References, to the reader, are like insulin to the diabetic: when needed they are indispensable, but in excess they induce coma. Moreover, when references are simply shovelled into a text in great gobbets, it is hard to resist the suspicion that the author has not read them all, but has copied some from a previous author's list. The story is told of one author who mischievously included in his list a bogus reference to an obscure foreign journal, and gleefully noted its frequent appearance in future articles. One of the joys of this present book is that the number of references to each topic...